Gamescom: The Origin and Future of Blizzard’s Hearthstone

Blizzard surprised many fans when it introduced Hearthstone at PAX East earlier this year. A departure for Blizzard, Hearthstone is a charming, accessible digital card game that recently entered beta.

In an interview at Gamescom, executive producer Hamilton Chu and lead artist Ben Thompson explained the origin of the project, plus the potential future of its booster packs, tournament play and more.

“A bunch of us have been fans of this genre – collectible card games, trading card games – for a long, long time,” Chu told IGN. “We thought that if we could take this, the joy that we have in this, and put the Blizzard polish on it and get it out to a lot of people and make it really successful, that would be a great project. We were all really passionate about it.”

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Chu confirmed that Hearthstone was never intended to be part of World of Warcraft itself, but instead “has been its own self-contained stand-alone game” from the start.

“We went through a variety of different options. Really, Warcraft ended up dictating a lot of it by itself, as a game,” Thompson said. “Mainly because there are so many opportunities in World of Warcraft to pull from all facets of artwork. You have the serious and the epic. You have some silly, fun, tongue-in-cheek material. Right there is a complete set of cards waiting to happen. We hit a number of those. If you look at Ragnaros, the fire lord, slamming into the ground with the cracks and glowing lava, then you turn right around you’ve got Nat Pagle, who’s funny and whimsical in his own right.”

“The whole reason to approach the art from a new stylistic twist, to kind of add on to what Warcraft already does so well, was really part of making it as successful as possible,” he continued. “It’s taken on a life of its own. We’ve started using the word “charming” to describe so many things about the game. Quickly following that came physicality, really making it feel tangible. Ultimately, it’s a game that people in the world of Warcraft, in Azeroth itself, would play in their favorite local inn.”

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After launch, there’s a lot of possibilities. There are tournaments, eSports, or even single-player content.

Both Chu and Thompson emphasized that the idea of a digital card game was exciting from the beginning, as it allows for opportunities that physical cards can’t provide.

“It didn’t take hardly any time to get down to deciding that digital was the space that we wanted this game released in,” Thompson said. “It’s a variety of reasons, but some of the biggest ones were the idea of a card that says ‘a blizzard strikes your opponent’s minions for X damage’ is not nearly as compelling as showing you a blizzard coming down and hitting the board and pieces flying around shards of ice. I would much rather cast that spell, and we only get to do that in this space. It helps ease the mechanics, too, if you look at the way randomness is handled, or the way the numbers are handled as far as spawning tokens or other cases that come up. It’s just done. You don’t have to worry about keeping track of things. You’re just enjoying the game.”

“It’s been really liberating along a number of axes,” Chu added. “The way that you interact with and deal with your collection is very different. You can sort things. You can search for things. That relationship is just really different. Stuff like our arena play mode, the way we designed it is something you just can’t do in the physical world. There are all sorts of cool designs and features that we ended up using.”

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As for the team creating the game, Chu told us that “it’s a mix” of experienced card game designers and existing staff at Blizzard who were just fans of the genre. “There are some folks with a lot of card experience, and then there are some folks who are enthusiasts and just great designers and engineers and artists in their own right,” he said. “It’s a great fusion of experiences on the team.”

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The idea of a card that says ‘a blizzard strikes your opponent’s minions for X damage’ is not nearly as compelling as showing you a blizzard coming down.

The goal from the beginning was to make Hearthstone accessible, something that both Chu and Thompson feel the team succeeded in doing.

“That was the goal with Hearthstone – small, easy to understand, quick to learn, hard to master, 10-minute games, in and out, have some fun with your friends,” Thompson said. “You enjoy it so much that you want to share it with others, and the only way that ends up happening is if it’s accessible, if it’s all of those things.”

“That was definitely the number one goal, across the board, from the art that Ben was talking about – making it inviting and warm and bringing people in – to the game itself being simple to understand, to even the name of the game, Hearthstone,” Chu added. “We picked it because it sounded kind of warm and inviting. It sounds like a safe place to go and have some fun.”

Looking ahead, both Chu and Thompson see a lot of potential opportunities for Hearthstone, including tournament play.

“After launch, there’s a lot of possibilities,” Chu said. “There are tournaments, eSports, or even single-player content. We’re really looking forward to getting this in the hands of the players and seeing what really resonates with them.”

That said, Chu was clear that even as Hearthstone evolves, there’s no plans to allow players to trade cards or add any kind of real money auction house.

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“We decided to go away from that,” Chu said about trading. “Obviously that’s something that you think about. But a key thing for us was focusing on what the game was about – getting new cards in your collection, crafting your deck, and playing the game. When you have trading, that brings in a bunch of other stuff with it. Some of that is really fun, like haggling with people or searching for the best deal or playing the market to see how values go up and down. But that’s just not what Hearthstone is. Hearthstone is focused on these other aspects of gameplay.”

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Some of the obvious ones would be new play spaces or boards coming into play. We could be involving new heroes down the line, possibly.

Still, Blizzard is realistic about the model for Hearthstone, and acknowledges that new monetization opportunities will come in the future, including new card packs.

“The thing we’re trying to focus on is putting stuff in the game that players want to see in the game,” Chu said. “We’ll make the game the best it can be, whether that’s with cards or other ideas that might be in there. If we think it will make the game great, we’ll come up with other business models that make sense around it.”

“Some of the obvious ones would be new play spaces or boards coming into play,” Thompson added. “We could be involving new heroes down the line, possibly. We’re missing two classes from what we’ve shipped with, the vanilla WoW style, with nine heroes. It could involve any number of different things. We’re really looking to the community to see what they gravitate towards and what’s most exciting to them to help inform that decision.”

Hearthstone will launch on PC and Mac this year, with an iPad version to launch “shortly thereafter.” Chu emphasized that “the games should all be the same game,” with no differences between platforms.